


By What Follows

by AnnaMarieM



Series: As They Sing [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Depression, F/M, Mystery, Poetic, vampire
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-25
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-06 17:58:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 1,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12822993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnaMarieM/pseuds/AnnaMarieM
Summary: About the story of Crow and Meretje, a melancholy tale written by way of poetic diary entries of Crow himself. A prequel to And So it Goes





	1. I

_ \--/--/----  _

_ Her name was Meretje, and she was the soft petals of a summer flower, with its faded yellows and browns, always facing the sun. She was the still warmth of the sun on your back in between the brushes of cold winds. With golden taffy hair, pulled between her fingers, shimmering just as the sweet between the spokes of the factory. Her eyes were indescribable, starbursts, supernovae of cornflower blue and silver, in a sugar sky, maple and hazelnut, highlighted with gold. Big, round doe eyes, but smart and calculating. She was soft, but her mind was firm. Her experience is of that of ingesting a glass of warm milk, filling your stomach with radiating fulfillment.  _

_ Of course, she is only a woman. I am starstruck by her galaxies.  _

_ She liked my name, she said it fit me. She called me bird, called me crow. She said I was sly like the birds, resourceful. She said the name fit me because it meant ‘Fox’. She said I was cunning and quiet.  _

_ I told her later that she could fight dragons.  _

 

_ -Criomhthain _


	2. II

_ \--/--/---- _

_ Her family forgot the sun long ago.  _

_ And so, she stays with me. I take care of her, I keep her safe.  _

_ We married a month ago, in a field of lavender all in white at her request. It was golden hour and the sun melted through her dress and her hair, blinding me. She said that the way the light reflected into my dark eyes made them shine into amber. I married us, singing the covenants to her, tasting the poetry on my tongue, savoring the taste before the words melted down my throat.  _

_ My degree was what made the marriage legal, but it was our love, and nothing else, that made it real.  _

_ We bought a little-overgrown house at the edge of the town, close to the hill we married on, overlooking a valley filled with a forest from a different world. She said the forest was mine, with its silver leaves and blue fog, and she had the lavender and wheat fields with the golden light.  _

_ We had a house that made up the difference. It had vines up the side, and a flourishing peach rose bush, filled out with overgrown buttercups. The interior itself is small, one large room with two attaching rooms and a bathroom. The large front room had a kitchen in the left corner, but nothing else in the room, presumably where the previous owners placed their living room furniture. That day I brought in the little furniture we had, Meretje’s favorite rocking chair, a small table with stools, a bed, and a bookshelf filled with a random assortment of books, from the bible (my studies) to ones on mental ailments (Meretje). _

_ That was how she found me.  _

_ I suppose I should tell the story... maybe next time.  _

_ -Criomhthain  _


	3. III

_ \--/--/---- _

_ I was sick and quiet constantly. I turned to the church in an effort to fix myself, believing, like they told me, I was this way because the devil cursed me, that I was this way because I must have done something so morally wrong that my soul was conflicted within me. I stayed alone, only perpetuating the mentality against me. I was cold, I was stern, I was dejected. I couldn’t sleep, I often couldn’t get out of bed, not because of a physical ailment, but because of some force I couldn’t explain.  _

_ I felt helpless, like I constantly had a massive weight pushing down on my chest, and weights pulling on my jaw and my backbone. Life was still and dull, I did everything I could to bring it back, I didn’t sleep, studying the scriptures and doing anything the pastors told me. I did what the physicians said, didn’t eat for days at a time, attempting to lose myself in my work.   _

_ It worked. I lost everything, I forgot who I was at times, forgetting I was even there. Like I wasn’t even human, looking to the stars that people had been so avidly studying recently, wondering how in the world all the new discoveries could even matter. Perhaps they mattered too much, and I too little. I was just a small speck in this world, possibly in an even larger space.  _

_ That was when I met Meretje.  _

_ I am closer to God now than I ever was in those dusty churches, starving and fading.  _

_ -Criomhthain _


	4. IV

_ \--/--/---- _

_ She loved my eyes. That was the first thing she told me. I was surprised. She took my face in her hands, bringing me down to look at her, and raised her fingers, hovering them close to my face, brushing my eyelashes. She said they made my face look simple, without the wrinkles and creases of most men, the skin was smooth and the irises were dark. I told her I liked her's better and she laughed. _

_ Oh, that laugh- it felt like a breath in my lungs after years of becoming stone. She taught me, she came to change me. She met me in that dusty church.  _

_ She came often, sometimes sitting silently, sometimes coming up to speak with me, those were my favorite times, but I played for her every time she came, the organ in the church ringing like she were it’s heart when she sat in the pews. _

_ “You’ve got Melancholia.” She had said to me, before reiterating herself “although from what I learn, I feel a more proper explanation is a ‘Depression of the Soul’.” She explained.  _

_ Her explanation hadn’t helped, but she continued to visit me constantly explaining that I wasn’t cursed, That this wasn’t because of something I did.  _

_ In fact, there was nothing I could do to remove it, but I could help myself react better. It was a sickness.  _

_ (I argued that I felt fine) _

_ “Do you really?”  _

_ I had lied, I didn’t. I hadn’t felt  ‘fine’ in a long time, but I wasn’t really sure what feeling ‘fine’ meant anymore.  _

_ She helped me realize more than Fine-ness in my life, but proper peace.  _

_ -Criomhthain _


	5. V

_ \--/--/---- _

_And so life went on, and I fell in love. She never did. She didn’t fall in love. Falling is a surprise, falling is against your will, she always wanted love, always accepted it. She was just_ in _love, always._

_ Her family abandoned her, marrying me was her biggest mistake, they hated me, hated her for marrying me, hated us for being so much more then they could ever be. Our lives were good and peaceful until their hate hit her- burning her. It was then my turn to help her.  _ _ No one comes back from that unaffected.  _

_ She cried for the first I’d ever seen. I told her and she sputtered. She said she cried for me many times in our early days.   _

_ That was when we moved away to that little house in the field.  _

_ She brought all her books, and I brought mine, we took her favorite rocking chair, stealing it away in the middle of the night from her parent's house. The bed was given by her old grandparents, and I made the table and stools.  Everything we own had a story to be told, too many to write here.  _

_ We took our story and made it ours, made it quiet and kind, and lived together away from everything. _

_ -Criomhthain _

 


	6. VI

_ \--/--/---- _

_ We used to go to the kiddy theatre so often before she got sick, we went to see plays and films, she loved the brightly colored circuses and the stained glass windows that the churches had and the bright silks the actors wore. She couldn’t see them anymore, so I drew her paintings and told her stories when I could manage to be home. I worked often, struggling to support our tiny family in our tiny house. I flew from odd job to the next, struggling to find someplace that would accept me.  _

_ It seemed that as she got sicker, the world did too, there was danger brewing in our small town. There were people disappearing, violent scenes with figures lying motionlessly, figures torn up by what we could only assume were wild animals, but their wounds were cleaned, skin pale, injuries only faintly pink instead of the dark oozing red you'd expect.  _

_ It was an anomaly in this small town, it was never marred by much violence, this was a disturbance. _

_They didn't know what to do, didn't know how to react._

_ They shut the cities down when the killings and disappearances became drastic. We weren’t the only ones, it was like an infection, a disease, overtaking many towns near ours. An epidemic. The theater workers voiced their fear often, but rarely asked for my opinion. They let me work there, saying it was a "home of oddities", but they still saw me as a stranger among them. _

_ I wish to know my own story, to give some basis behind that title, a stranger among the strange- but I can't remember anything, my first memories are found so late, within that old dusty church I've for so long forgotten.  _

_ I was okay with not knowing, telling myself that the new life I make is far more important than my history, but yet the feeling lingers. If not only for my appearance I've been treated differently, like a commodity, or like an attraction.  _

 

_ After the attacks began to grow worse, there was a curfew put in place, the only sense about the crimes to be found in their time, nearly always occurring after dark fell, so in an act of true irony, no man or woman was  _ _ allowed to be out on the streets after 5, for that was when they hunted, right after the golden hour.  _

_ -Criomhthain _


End file.
